In 1869 Maria ordered her lover to walk with her in Lord Holland’s Lane, where she told him that she was taking enough laudanum to kill herself. They walked, talked, argued, pleaded and tried to reason with each other. By the time they had reached the bridge over Regent’s Canal, Maria was in such a state that she tried to throw herself into the water. Burne-Jones grappled with her and they rolled around on the ground. Two policemen turned up, separated the pair, restraining Burne-Jones while trying to get to the bottom of the matter. Luckily Maria’s cousin and former lover, probably jealous for her attention, turned up and took charge of Maria, helping her to walk away. It seemed he had known something was up and deliberately followed the pair.
Burne-Jones arrived home in a dreadful state, his nerves were shot to pieces and he was shivering with shock and cold. Georgiana put him straight to bed, no questions asked. William Morris came to the rescue claiming that Burne-Jones could do well to have a little trip to Rome, an artists’ inspirational journey. It would get his friend away from the dramatic Maria and give him time to recover. They got as far as Dover and had to go back as Burne-Jones was too ill to travel. For some days after his return home Georgiana pretended he was still away, believing his shattered mind and body needed quiet rest. She even lied to friends about his whereabouts so that nothing would intrude on the healing process.
While his health did revive somewhat he was left in a delicate state. Also, Warrington Taylor, the manager of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., told both Burne-Jones and Rossetti that their romantic affairs would ruin the firm’s reputation if they continued. Burne-Jones, suitably chastened, was filled with guilt. He had been unfaithful to his wife, ruined the life of his beautiful mistress and was possibly damaging his business partners.
Still, none of this stopped Burne-Jones’s affair with Maria from continuing, albeit at a less tumultuous level. They saw each other regularly, went out together, stayed in together and fought with each other. Until 1872, that is, when Maria suddenly went to Paris. There is conjecture that she had lined up a new lover in France and as her previous one was not going to sacrifice everything for her she could now afford to toss him aside. Even though things settled down a bit after she left, a correspondence continued between them for years afterwards, and in 1874, during a trip by Burne-Jones to Italy, there is evidence that they met up again and continued where they had left off two years before.
In 1875 a new muse entered Burne-Jones’s world. Frances Grahame, the daughter of one of his friends, had grown into a lovely young woman. She was not 20 and Burne-Jones was 40. Although he sent her letters full of his undying love, his grand passion and his need for her, Frances, although flattered and kind was not interested in starting an affair with him. Over the next few years Burne-Jones would continue to press his suit but to no avail. Frances, having married John Horner and started a family, always remained kind and loving to Burne-Jones but was never able to reciprocate the type of love he wanted. Perhaps he would not have known what to do with it if she had. As we have seen, when he had succumbed to the beautiful Maria he had become immensely unsettled and unhappy.
While renewing his pursuit of Frances, Burne-Jones was also declaring his love for another woman, a friend of Frances’s, Helen Gaskell. She was 39 to his 58. Helen was another woman in distress, very unhappily married to a man who may well have beaten her. Their meetings had to be kept secret, although it doesn’t seem as though the affair had a sexual element to it.
These last two attempts at romantic unions with beautiful women, whom Burne-Jones liked to paint, came to nothing. Before his death he asked all the recipients of his love letters to destroy them as he did not want anything to remain to incriminate him and bring his widow embarrassment. However, most of them did not. Georgiana wrote a biography of her husband but was careful to gloss over areas that were painful to her and to his memory.
Burne-Jones and Georgiana were married for thirty-six years. In all that time she only played the muse for a brief time, but in reality she was the stability behind him that let him indulge in the emotional rides that gave him the inspiration to paint.
Part 6
Mistresses in the
Twentieth Century
FLORENCE DUGDALE AND
THOMAS HARDY
When Florence Dugdale wrote to Thomas Hardy in 1905 asking if she could meet him, he had already been married to Emma for thirty-five years. They had a convivial marriage although they had stopped sharing a bedroom since 1899. They were companionable but were steadily growing further apart. Hardy had been tempted to have an affair from as early as 1889 when he fell in love with the married Rosamund Tomson, but she was only interested in friendship. Then there was Florence Henniker but she too was only wanting a platonic relationship, flattered by Hardy’s attentions but nothing more.
Then Florence Dugdale’s letter came out of the blue, telling the writer how much she loved his work and she really wanted to meet him. Although Hardy received fan mail he had never received this kind of request before and he invited her to come to his house, Max Gate. By chance or design Emma was not there. Lunch was very enjoyable and Hardy invited Florence to come again.
Florence Dugdale
Hardy was in need of a muse and he thought he might just have found her in pretty, young and intelligent Florence Dugdale. For her part, Florence enjoyed having someone to admire, or at least she pretended she did. What her motives were it is difficult to tell. She was an aspiring writer and maybe wanted a helping hand in getting work published, or she may have been genuinely a keen fan.
Florence was one of five daughters of the headmaster of a Church of England School at Enfield, north London, and a staunch supporter of the Conservative Party. She became a pupil-teacher at her father’s school when she was 15 until it became too much for her and she took a position as a lady’s companion in 1906. What she really wanted was to be a writer. One of the things that make Florence’s motives for Hardy’s friendship questionable is the way she has distorted the truth about certain aspects of how they met and what her true employment was. For a start, she didn’t want to publicly admit she was a paid companion, instead she told people she was just visiting friends, staying with them for a while. Then there were some curious anomalies in her tale about meeting Hardy. She never admitted she had written to him as a complete stranger and invited herself to his house. She gave a couple of different accounts for this. One was that she had met the Hardys while out walking with a friend, they got chatting and she was invited back to their house; another version has Florence Henniker introducing her to the Hardys as a couple. The latter story cannot be true because Florence Dugdale did not become acquainted with Florence Henniker until well after she had established her friendship with Hardy.
The old lady to whom Florence had been hired as companion finally had to go into a nursing home. Her husband, Sir Thornley Stoker, had enjoyed having Florence about the place. He had given her a typewriter when he discovered she wanted to be a writer and then on his wife’s death gave her a ring. Florence used her typewriter a lot, teaching herself to touch type. Finding out that Florence could type gave Hardy an excuse to see more of her. She would type for him, something that she later used as a step up the ladder by stating she had been his secretary. Hardy also got her to undertake research for his work. In return he sent letters of introduction to newspapers and publishers recommending her work and Florence began to carve out a career for herself as a writer.
Hardy fell in love with Florence; he took her on holidays, wrote her letters and praised her writing (when in fact, according to opinion, it was really quite ordinary). One thing he did not intend, though, was to leave his wife Emma. It was years before Emma and Florence met, and their eventual meeting had nothing to do with Hardy. Emma was to give a talk at the Lyceum Club of which Florence was a member. On hearing of this Florence asked Hardy if she should introduce herself. Hardy was very encouraging.
Instead of being a rival for her husband’s affection, E
mma found Florence as admiring of her as she was of Hardy. Florence was good at flattery. She liked to make people feel good, although she had her own reasons for doing so, usually to do with her ambition.
What transpired was another triangle: Hardy, Emma and Florence. Both Emma and Thomas Hardy loved Florence, both wanted her attention and sometimes the result was disastrous, such as the Christmas of 1910 when Florence spent it with the Hardys at Max Gate. Hardy told Emma he wanted to take Florence to meet his family. Emma was very angry and told him that they were sure to try their hardest to make Florence hate her. Emma stormed out of the room and Florence swore to herself she would never spend a Christmas with the pair again.
Then at the end of November 1912 Emma died suddenly after complaining of feeling unwell. She had gone to bed one evening, agreed to see the doctor but refused to let him actually examine her. She died the following morning from heart failure.
Hardy was not thought to be able to manage on his own. Although he had several domestic staff he needed a housekeeper. There were two contenders for the position: Florence, of course, and Emma’s niece Lilian. Katie, Hardy’s sister, had stepped in for the interim. Lilian probably wanted to escape living with her mother and saw her uncle’s situation as perfect; she’d be head of the household, a woman with influence and authority, she’d also be able to entertain Hardy’s interesting guests, all in a highly respectable situation. However, Katie and Florence couldn’t stand Lilian; she was domineering and snobbish, especially to Florence. Lilian was out to make trouble; not only did she want the position for herself but she wanted to know what Florence had to do with her uncle, she spread rumours about Florence that began to cause problems for Hardy.
Emma’s death had been a shock to Hardy. He had probably taken her for granted then when she suddenly wasn’t there any more he began a period of profound reminiscing. These thoughts and memories were set down as a series of poems, which became some of his greatest work. To escape into the past was a glorious way of avoiding his present problems, which involved who was going to do what at Max Gate. Hardy wanted to please everyone and himself; he wanted to avoid scandal but did not want to lose Florence, who was still very much the object of his passion. Yet at the same time all he wanted to do was think about his life with Emma. Eventually he asked Florence to marry him, thinking that by making her mistress of the house all problems would be sorted. Yet it wasn’t going to work that easily. Lilian had been poisoning the staff against Florence and if she continued in the house there would always be an undermining of Florence’s authority.
In the end it was Florence who sorted out the mess: either Lilian went or she did, she would not marry him. Hardy packed poor Lilian off home, although he did it very kindly and kept in touch with her for the rest of his life.
On 10 February 1914, Thomas Hardy and Florence Dugdale came together at last. If it was Florence’s fairy tale come true then she didn’t seem to enjoy it that much. She was constantly feeling jealous over Hardy’s memories and poems about Emma. The four years after Emma’s death were some of his most productive, especially for writing poetry. Florence found her husband’s absorption in his work to be a source of contention in their relationship. It is a wonder though, that having wanted to be a writer herself, she did not understand Hardy’s need to work. Often it is exactly that which attracts someone to a person that in the end pushes them away. Florence stuck by Hardy, worked as his secretary and sounding board. She seemed happy to work on anything that didn’t involve Emma.
In the last few weeks of Hardy’s life Florence stayed as close to him as she could, reading to him, chatting and attending to his needs. Yet it seems she may not have been there for his last words and final breath, which were given to Florence’s sister Eva when Hardy called her name saying, ‘What is this?’
Hardy left an estate worth £100,000 (around £212,000 in today’s money). It was broken up into bequests to charities and various relatives (the bulk going to his brother and sister). Florence was left the house, Max Gate, granted income from all Hardy’s royalties and a small annuity of £600. If she were to remarry this sum would halve. This was not Hardy being mean to his second wife, it was a standard clause to protect widows from being tricked into marriage by men just after their money.
What did surprise Hardy’s friend Sydney Cockerill was the fact that Florence had entered into an engagement with the writer J.M. Barrie only half a year after her husband’s death. The marriage never took place, Barrie getting cold feet and breaking off the engagement. Florence was both shocked and upset by his actions but they did remain friends. Perhaps in marrying Florence, Barrie had hoped to hold on to some last shred of his friend Hardy, but as time moved on he realised it would not work. When Barrie died in 1937 Florence was very sad. Yet she had another problem of her own to face, she had been diagnosed with bowel cancer and did not live much longer after Barrie’s death.
REBECCA WEST AND
H.G. WELLS
Rebecca West is known in her own right as a writer and intellectual. She was also, for a time, the second main woman in the life of H.G. Wells; she was for all her ideas of freedom for women, his mistress. Free love may have been the motto that both writers subscribed to, but when you look at the fact that Rebecca lived hidden away in an insignificant house, pretending not to be the mother of her son Anthony, one can’t help thinking there are echoes of times gone by when illegitimate births were seen as indiscretions to be concealed.
Rebecca West was born Cicely Isabel Fairfield but took up the pen name of Rebecca West after seeing a production of the Ibsen play Rosmersholm, which has a character of that name in it. Rebecca was writing for a radical women’s paper called New Free Woman but, despite the free thinking of the women in her own family, she thought that it was a good idea to keep her real identity under wraps, so as not to cause embarrassment.
Wells met Rebecca after she had written a lengthy review of one his latest books, the novel Marriage. In the article she calls Wells ‘the old maid among novelists’ and accused him of writing about sex with a mind that had been too long obsessed with science fiction. When Wells read the review he was intrigued and invited the little-known female writer to lunch, probably hoping that an animated debate would ensue. That first visit lasted well into the afternoon.
Wells’s first wife was his cousin, the beautiful and animated Isabel Mary. He met her in 1886 but they didn’t marry until 1891. Wells was to write about this first serious relationship in his autobiography, saying that he’d been made to wait to marry Isabel and that he was made to marry her in a church and that, actually, he didn’t believe in the institution of marriage anyway. Almost immediately things went wrong and in 1892 Wells met Amy Catherine Robbins.
Two years later, after the divorce with Isabel, Wells married Amy whom he renamed Jane. Jane was to become the mainstay of his life; she knew about all his affairs, stating that she realised he needed extended times to be alone or to do his own thing. The first time Wells showed any sign of needing his own space was after the birth of their first child, a boy, George Philip in 1901. Wells just disappeared.
Jane, with what became her trademark elastic attitude to her husband’s self-centred needs, told him that she would give him all the time and space he needed whenever he wanted it. This was probably how she kept him married to her. Wells described Jane as being delicate and ethereal, and at her funeral gave an elegy that was described by some as a total myth. One family friend said that Jane had been one of the strongest women they’d ever known. Wells’s words of farewell to his dead wife make one wonder if his wife was perhaps the greatest of his muses and his mistresses were just for fun.
H.G. Wells
West met Wells in 1912 and after their initial meeting an affair soon began. Rebecca has been likened to Ann Veronica, the heroine of one of Wells’s novels, calling on her married lover to make love to her. Whether this is true or not, the idea that the young writer was influenced by the older writer’s work and using it as a c
atalyst to bring them together makes the idea of mistress as muse particularly interesting: West may have become Wells’s muse but it certainly worked the other way too. Although the affair started passionately enough and involved two advocates of free love, it was Wells who first broke it off.
Wells was already involved with a woman he termed his mistress, Elizabeth Von Arnim, another writer. Perhaps Elizabeth was not as accommodating about sharing her lover as Jane was about sharing her husband, but the outcome was that Wells fled overseas. Before he left he told Rebecca that they would have to break off all communication between them, he couldn’t even stay her friend. Unable to understand or accept the huge wrench, Rebecca was on the point of suicide.
The young woman’s sensible mother took her daughter off to the Continent for an extended trip through France and Spain. Rebecca wrote and then published accounts of her travels and Wells, on reading these, initiated a reunion between them, telling her that her writing was ‘gorgeous’ and that he wanted them to be friends again. At this point in the history of the love affair, the modern reader begins to have doubts as to their sincerity in anything. Whilst both Wells and West were supporters of feminism,West reacted like the heroine of some soppy romance and Wells was behaving like a typical male chauvinist. Still, theory doesn’t always play out in practice. What Wells perhaps didn’t tell Rebecca was that his affair with Von Arnim (who Wells refers to as ‘little e’) was over and he was free to take another lover – or he needed consolation.
Other Women Page 15
